WD Introduces 8TB My Book Duo, 4TB My Book 3.0 External Drives

Western Digital has announced two new
external hard drive units for HD video editors, professional
photographers and the like. These are the 8TB (8000GB) My Book
Thunderbolt Duo and the 4TB (4000GB) My Book 3.0. Both,
according to StorageReview,
make use of Hitachi's 4TB disk technology rather than the in-house
developed WD Caviar Greens that usually inhabit the My Book series,
though they didn't explain how they came to know that.

The 8TB
Thunderbolt Duo boasts dual Thunderbolt interface ports and
contains two of the aforementioned 4TB Hitachi drives working in
tandem. One can configure the drives in a RAID0 array for 8TB
combined capacity, in a RAID1 array for 4TB of storage but higher
reliability, and in JBOD mode to access the drives individually. The
Duo is primarily marketed toward Mac users, though
Thunderbolt-enabled PC users can surely reformat the device for use.
In addition, Thunderbolt daisy-chaining is supported, allowing one to
string a bunch of these with peripherals like HD monitors, all
through a single Thunderbolt port on the computer.

Meanwhile, the tamer My
Book 3.0 4TB unit is a single-drive design that trades the
Thunderbolt capability for USB 3.0, which is backwards-compatible
with computers sporting only USB 2.0 ports. WD assures out-of-box
compatibility with the upcoming Windows 8 operating system and
includes its SmartWare software suite, capable of fully-automatic
data backups.

Both of these enclosures are slowly
coming available to retailers, with the My Book 4TB set for $249.99
and the 8TB Thunderbolt Duo set for a whopping $849.99.

Postscript: Amazon.com, too, and for a bit cheaper than stated above. Here and here, respectively.

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